Egypt releases first-ever October War documents

National Archive publishes book of official documents on 1973 Arab-Israeli War but fails to include those relating to military matters

After 40 years, the National Archive will on Sunday publish the first official documents on the October War with Israel.
The documents will be published in a 600-page book called Misr Fi Qalb Al-Ma'raka (Egypt in the Heart of the Battle).
National Archive director Abdel-Wahed El-Nabawe tells Ahram Online that the book will not contain military documents, but will give details on the state's preparation for war.
The documents will cover the period from 5 June 1967 until the end of the 1973 war.
The publication will end a publishing ban on documents on Egypt's modern wars.
The book includes documents from the minister of finance ordering that the ministry's storages be opened to fulfil the armed forces' demands.
Another document from the health ministry reveals the ministry's preparation for war by training new paramedics.
However, this are not the sort of documents required to study what really happened during the war.
The Archive does not have a single official paper regarding military operations or military records. Moreover, it does not have documents regarding any of Egypt's wars after 1952, including 1956 and 1967.
According to El-Nabawe, all the 1973 war documents are located at the defence ministry and no one has access to them.
The Archive's military documents stop in 1952 when the Free Officers topped the king. Since then the defence ministry has stopped delivering its documents to the Archive.
"We don't have any documents regarding military operations during the war, actually we don't have any document regarding the Egyptian military since 1952," El-Nabawe said to Ahram Online.
"We only have documents from the 19th century, when the national army was established, and from the war ministry during the first half of the 20th century."
War documents are divided between the defence ministry and the presidency.
Historians looking for military documents have a number of alternatives: the National Archives of America, Israel, Britain, and Russia which were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union.
El-Nabawe has been calling for war documents to be deposited at the Archive so they can be indexed and released.
The Archive also fails to contain criminal and prison records, or the cables of Egyptian embassies around the world.
According to Khaled Fahmy, head of history at the American University in Cairo, who has long called for the release of these documents, all the histories of the October War are written from documents in the American, British and Israeli archives, which offer a different narrative from the Egyptian one.
"A quick look at the bibliographies of history books on the October War shows none of them depend on Egyptian sources, except for memoirs of retired generals - this is a disaster," he said at a public lecture earlier this year.
Historian Mohamed Afifi, head of history at Cairo University, says few people in Egypt are aware of the importance of history and the value of the documents.
"Usually the publication and release of documents is difficult in countries that are not completely democratic - we're living in one of them. The release of documents and freedom of information are two important measures related to freedom and democracy. The culture here ignores the importance of history, there's no conspiracy about it, there's ignorance," Afifi explains.
According to Ordinance No.472 of 1979 all documents related to national security should be classified. But the percentage of classified documents in most of the world's archive is between two and five percent.
Egyptian law obliges all state institutions to hand their documents over after a maximum of 15 years. The classification of documents is determined through cooperation between the institution concerned and the National Archive.
The law imposes different secrecy periods on documents according to the sensitivity of the material. Some documents are declassified after 15 to 25 years, and the maximum period is 50 years.
"The maximum period is 50 years but there are two exceptions. The first is if the document is still effective at the time of its declassification, in which case the secrecy period is extended," El-Nabawe says.
"The second is documents regarding individuals like prisoners, when the document is classified until 75 years after the death of the individual concerned."
Many institutions do not hand their documents to the Archive, including the military. Not only because the law is very weak, but because of the position of the Archive within the state bureaucracy.
"The Archive is a subdivision of the National Library and Archive, which is part of the culture ministry," El-Nabawe says
"This is wrong. The Archive should be an independent institution under the presidency or cabinet. The Archive should have the ability to oblige state institutions to hand over their documents."
The archive law underwent many amendments to help improve the collection, classification and declassification process after 2001, but every time it was stalled.
During the Mubarak era, Botrous-Ghali, the minister of finance, said changing the law was not important. During Morsi's rule the situation did not change, prime minister Hisham Qandil said amending the law was not an urgent matter.
According to the law, the defence ministry should have deposited all of its 1973 war documents at the Archive in 1988.
El-Nabawe hopes cooperation with the defence ministry will take place over the next few months, but he believes no radical change or reform will happen unless the National Archive become independent.
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